In recent years, with the current advancements in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots have the potential to support the field of healthcare. Robotic systems are often introduced in the care of the elderly, children, and persons with disabilities, in hospitals, in rehabilitation and walking assistance, and other healthcare situations. In this survey paper, the recent advances in robotic technology applied in the healthcare domain are discussed. The paper provides detailed information about state-of-the-art research in care, hospital, assistive, rehabilitation, and walking assisting robots. The paper also discusses the open challenges healthcare robots face to be integrated into our society.

Human–robot collaboration in industrial applications is a challenging robotic task. Human working together with the robot at a workplace to complete a task may create unpredicted events for the robot, as humans can act unpredictably. Humans tend to perform a task in a not fully repetitive manner using their expertise and cognitive capabilities. The traditional robot programming cannot cope with these challenges of human–robot collaboration. In this paper, a framework for robot learning by multiple human demonstrations is introduced. Through the demonstrations, the robot learns the sequence of actions for an assembly task (high-level learning) without the need of pre-programming. Additionally, the robot learns every path as needed for object manipulation (low-level learning). Once the robot has the knowledge of the demonstrated task, it can perform the task in collaboration with the human. However, the need for adaptation of the learned knowledge may arise as the human collaborator could introduce changes in the environment, such as placing an object to be manipulated in a position and orientation different from the demonstrated ones. In this paper, a novel real-time adaptation algorithm to cope with these changes in the environment, introduced by the human factor, is proposed. The proposed algorithm is able to identify the sequence of actions needed to be performed in a new environment. A Gaussian Mixture Model-based modification algorithm is able to adapt the learned path in order to enable robot to successfully complete the task without the need of additional training by demonstration. The proposed framework copes with changes in the position and orientation of the objects to be manipulated and also provides obstacle avoidance. Moreover, the framework enables the human collaborator to suggest different sequence of actions for the learned task, which will be performed by the robot. The proposed algorithm was tested on a dual-arm industrial robot in an assembly scenario and the results are presented. Shown results demonstrate a potential of the proposed robot learning framework to enable continuous human–robot collaboration.

Assistive robots have the potential to support people with disabilities in their Activities of Daily Life. The drinking task has a high priority and requires constant assistance by caregivers to be executed regularly. Due to incapacitating disabilities such as tetraplegia, which is the paralysis of all limbs, affected people cannot use classic control interfaces such as joysticks. This paper presents a robotic solution to enable independent, straw-less drinking using a smart cup and no physically attached elements on the user. The system's hardware and software components are presented and the overarching control scheme described. The cup approaches the mouth utilising a user-friendly and vision-based robot control based on head pose estimation. Once contact has been established, the user can drink by tilting the cup with a force sensor-based control setup. Two experimental studies have been conducted, where the participants (mostly able-bodied and one tetraplegic), could separately experience the cup's contactless approach and the contact-based sequence. First results show a high user acceptance rate and consistent positive feedback. The evaluation of internal data showed a high reliability of the safety-critical components with the test groups perceiving the system as intuitive and easy to use.

In this paper, a novel method for monitoring the changes in gait joint angle trajectories recorded using the low-cost and wearable Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) is presented. The introduced method is based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), an algorithm commonly used for evaluating the similarity of two time series which may vary in time and speed. DTW is employed as the measure of distance between two gait trajectories taken in different time instances, which could be used as an intuitive and effective measure for the evaluation of gait performances. The experimental results presented in the paper demonstrate that the proposed method is applicable for clinically relevant applications and is consequently adaptable to patients with diseases characterized with gait disorders and to different walking scenarios. The proposed method was firstly validated by applying the DTW-based measure on gait trajectories of five healthy subjects recorded while simulating different levels of walking disabilities. Then proposed measure was applied to estimate the distance between the “healthy” gait trajectories and gait trajectories of three patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) while performing single-task and dual-task overground walking. Also, the proposed measure was demonstrated as an effective measure for monitoring the changes in gait patterns of a PD patient before and after medication-based treatment. This result indicates potential use of proposed method for effective pharmacological management of PD.

Meal assistant robots form a very important part of the assistive robotics sector since self-feeding is a priority activity of daily living (ADL) for people suffering from physical disabilities like tetraplegia. A quick survey of the current trends in this domain reveals that, while tremendous progress has been made in the development of assistive robots for the feeding of solid foods, the task of feeding liquids from a cup remains largely underdeveloped. Therefore, this paper describes an assistive robot that focuses specifically on the feeding of liquids from a cup using tactile feedback through force sensors with direct human–robot interaction (HRI). The main focus of this paper is the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to learn what the best robotic actions are, based on the force applied by the user. A model of the application environment is developed based on the Markov decision process and a software training procedure is designed for quick development and testing. Five of the commonly used RL algorithms are investigated, with the intention of finding the best fit for training, and the system is tested in an experimental study. The preliminary results show a high degree of acceptance by the participants. Feedback from the users indicates that the assistive robot functions intuitively and effectively.

Assistive robotic manipulators have the potential to support the lives of people suffering from severe motor impairments. They can support individuals with disabilities to independently perform daily living activities, such as drinking, eating, manipulation tasks, and opening doors. An attractive solution is to enable motor impaired users to teach a robot by providing demonstrations of daily living tasks. The user controls the robot `manually' with an intuitive human-robot interface to provide demonstration, which is followed by the robot learning of the performed task. However, the control of robotic manipulators by motor impaired individuals is a challenging topic. In this paper, a novel head gesture-based interface for hands-free robot control and a framework for robot learning from demonstration are presented. The head gesture-based interface consists of a camera mounted on the user's hat, which records the changes in the viewed scene due to the head motion. The head gesture recognition is performed using the optical flow for feature extraction and support vector machine for gesture classification. The recognized head gestures are further mapped into robot control commands to perform object manipulation task. The robot learns the demonstrated task by generating the sequence of actions and Gaussian Mixture Model method is used to segment the demonstrated path of the robot's end-effector. During the robotic reproduction of the task, the modified Gaussian Mixture Model and Gaussian Mixture Regression are used to adapt to environmental changes. The proposed framework was evaluated in a real-world assistive robotic scenario in a small study involving 13 participants; 12 able-bodied and one tetraplegic. The presented results demonstrate a potential of the proposed framework to enable severe motor impaired individuals to demonstrate daily living tasks to robotic manipulators.